After a bit of experimentation I found the problem. (my problem anyway)
For the heck of it I decided to run an strace on gnome-terminal from
inside fluxbox to see if I could find the exact spot where the program
would hang for 5 minutes until it would finally decide to load.
It seemed to be hanging on connecting a socket to localhost. I tried to
ping localhost and nothing.
Apparently the loopback interface wasn't added to
/etc/network/interfaces during installation. I'm guessing this is
because I skipped network setup during the install because I knew I had
to install ndiswrapper and the linksys drivers before it would work.
Adding:
iface lo inet loopback
to /etc/network/interfaces fixed the problem. Gnome now loads up just
fine.
--
ndiswrapper in modprobe.d causes system to semi-hang during login
https://launchpad.net/bugs/60313